PalmSource Introduces Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 for Smartphones

PalmSource has introduced Palm OS Cobalt 6.1, an enhanced version of Palm OS Cobalt. Designed to accelerate the development of next-generation Palm Powered smartphones and wireless devices, Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 builds on the foundation of Palm OS Cobalt and provides integrated telephony features, support for WiFi and Bluetooth and enhancements to the user interface.

Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 offers new functionality aimed at Palm OS licensees looking to participate in the growing wireless market, while maintaining the flexibility, ease-of-use and compatibility that are the hallmarks of Palm Powered wireless devices.

“We believe Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 optimizes our platform for the creation of cutting-edge smartphones and wireless devices that are powerful yet easy-to-use,” said David Nagel, president and CEO of PalmSource, Inc. “By integrating state-of-the-art wireless functionality into Palm OS, we are providing our Palm OS licensee and developer community a real time-to-market advantage in delivering smartphones and wireless mobile devices to consumers.”

New features in Palm OS Cobalt 6.1:

Integrated Telephony Components -- Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 now includes a standard GSM, MUX and a new GPRS API designed to make it easier and faster for hardware manufacturers to create a Palm Powered smartphone. Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 also adds standard support for NAND ROMs through an automatic backup and restore feature designed to prevent loss of user data in low power situations and during battery removal.

Standard Support for Bluetooth and WiFi -- Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 incorporates the latest v1.2 Bluetooth implementation, in addition to new headset and hands-free profiles critical to the development of next generation smartphones and other wireless devices. In addition, Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 provides standard 802.11 support designed to enable device manufactures to create products with built-in WiFi.

Standard Support for One-handed and Five-way Navigation -- With built-in support for one-handed and five-way navigation, Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 paves the way for better usability and software compatibility for Palm Powered smartphones and other wireless devices. In addition, the PIM applications have been updated to take advantage of this new functionality.

Enhanced User Interface -- Newly designed user interface features in Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 give many applications a new modern look and feel (see new datebook examples). Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 also introduces a Preferences application designed to enable a user to manage numerous individual settings and preferences in one central location. In addition, Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 is designed to encourage new categories of Palm Powered wireless devices by supporting QVGA, HVGA and VGA display resolutions in both portrait and landscape orientations.

The son becomes the father?

So...Cobalt 6.1 arrives before 6.0 even materializes? Beautiful. I'm wondering what's really going on here. Could it be that PalmSource licensees are having a difficult time acclimating Cobalt to their products, or vice versa. Or could it be they are not impressed by what they see, and are thus hesitant to release this white elephant? I'm getting some very strong vibes that Cobalt is going to be a MAJOR letdown.

RE: The son becomes the father?

PSRC is releasing the .1 upgrade 10 months after releasing 6.0. P1 is about to release a unit(s) w/ OS6 in a few weeks in my estimation. It will take cell manufacturers as long to prepare an OS6.1 device + many more months to get such a device thru the "red tape" of cell carriers. My thots on the 1st OS6.1 device in a local store is Q1 or Q2 of 2006. I wouldn't call the Verizon store tommorrow to see if their in yet in other words.

I don't see any hidden admissions of failure here. Although, those beautiful apps will make TT5 owners a little jealous. If the TT5 has Garnet, there may not be any TT5 owners. :-)

RE: The son becomes the father?

Or maybe PalmOne has a history of mistiming PDA releases, and there are no major players in the Palm OS fold that are capable of devoting the resources to quickly develop a PDA with Cobalt? Sounds a little more plausible.

RE: The son becomes the father?

So...I'm confused about the nature of Cobalt releases. Does this mean PalmSource is now taking a tripple OS strategy approach? Garnet for low-end PDAs...Cobalt 6.0 for handhelds...and Cobalt 6.1 for Smartphones?

Are we going to see the same interface illustrated in these screenshots applied to PDAs as well, or is this GUI strickly for Smartphones?

RE: The son becomes the father?

>>So...I'm confused about the nature of Cobalt releases. Does this mean PalmSource is now taking a tripple OS strategy approach? Garnet for low-end PDAs...Cobalt 6.0 for handhelds...and Cobalt 6.1 for Smartphones?

No - i think PIC's headline is a little misleading. This is Cobolt 6.1 - NOT "Cobolt 6.1 for Smartphones". They have added more wireless and smartphone features to Cobolt in 6.1 - but it is not a different smartphone version of the OS.

RE: The son becomes the father?

Also - Garnet is meant to target smartphones because that way they can have a 'cheaper' phone os designed for the smartphone market where comnpanies typically pay a lot less to lisense the OS. But companies can of course (and some company probably will) use Cobolt in a smartphone - but the lisense will be more. I thought the Garnet / Cobolt split was a rather neat way for Palm to get mileage out of OS 5, allowing them to provide a cheap OS for phones AND maintaining their typically higher PDA lisensing fee for Cobolt. Promote the guy who came up with that strategy!

RE: The son becomes the father?

There are not three PalmOSs. There is Garnet - what we see on all recent PalmOS handhelds. And there is Cobalt, which has just experienced an update to 6.1. The licensees have had access to 6.0, and now they have access to 6.1. 6.1 had a lot of fixes and additional features added to it. It is an upgrade of 6.0. Yes, it is possible to go thru an upgrade before the OS is released on hardware.

As for when we will see our first Cobalt devices. According to my converstations with PalmSource, we will not see a Cobalt device until next year. It is my guess that they either asked licensees to hold off on releasing Cobalt devices until after this point release, or that licensees were not ready to release Cobalt yet either due to being comfortable with Garnet for now, or looking for a better time to release a Cobalt device.

Sorry to make things sound as bad as they are. But Cobalt is ready, PS is really just growing into being a full fledged software company within today's market. It is even going as far as to not having a dual promotional run with Garnet and Cobalt. Garnet is the tried and true OS that will be used for a while yet. Cobalt is being pushed more towards the newer and smaller licensees so that they would be a step into the game.

In the core technology, there are many things in 6.1 that are on par with XP or Mac OS X or even what Microsoft plans for Avalon. For example, we now fully support window translucency effects -- with a single API call you can set the alpha level of your window, or even do very sophisticated arbitrary alpha compositing, all live, with no screen flicker. This is used in the new UI to do the fullscreen graffiti effect, true composited window shadows, etc.

Cobalt 6.1 is very much just the next version of Cobalt -- it is not at all a "new OS" in the way the transition from Garnet to Cobalt was. In fact much of what you are seeing in 6.1 is simply fulfilling the potential of the foundations that were already there in 6.0 but weren't completed due to deadlines. And trust me, there is plenty more remaining potential that we will be revealed in future releases. :)

> More like 6.0 was a release of whatever they had to meet> the deadline they had foolishly pre-announced. With that> out of the way, they got to work on a system that would> actually be usable, 6.1.

While it is certainly true that what we could get in to 6.0 was greatly limited by the schedule, that in no way means that 6.0 (or really 6.0.1) was not a "usable" a release. There was nothing foolish about getting it out when we did -- in fact, given how different Cobalt is than previous versions of the OS, it was far more important to get a real product out and into the hands of the licensees as soon as possible rather than take more time completing additional unnecessary features like a revamp of the UI.

> Wasn't this pig given to licensees in December 2003????> What the hell has been going on in the last year????

There is usually quite a lag between the time a new release of the OS is delivered to licensees and when it ships on devices. Our licensees tend to do a lot of customization of the OS for what they want to accomplish with their device, so it's not like in the desktop world where the platform vendor can just target a generic piece of hardware and all the hardware manufactures can basically use the result as-is.

Plus, in the case of Cobalt we have what is essentially a brand new OS. Much of the custom work the licensees have done in the past on Garnet needs to be ported to Cobalt, and these things are often... ah... "intimately tied" to the OS architecture, requiring significant effort to port over. (Often licensees have to do the same things we did three years ago, when we for example sat down and said, "okay these Notification Manager APIs... how are we going to get them to work in a new protected memory OS?")

RE: The son becomes the father?

Everyone is confused because of "smartphone" word in news. I think, that PSRC just means every GSM/CDMA-connected PDA. As long as Treo 600 can be called both Smartphone (for a shape) or Communicator (for a functionality).

Actually, i think, that Cobalt 6.0 simulator has NO multithreading at all - as long as i found NO multithread program-code at all (good, i could have looked bad, but:)

The New Web Browser 3.0 works NOT in background mode on Cobalt 6.0 Simulator! It works good with three (not more %-( ) pages, opened within it, but as i tap Home button, it goes all off...I'm waiting for 6.1 Simulator, but if this problem still there... That's a shame on PSRC...

____________________Future Online!Sorry for my bad english :(

RE: The son becomes the father?

> Everyone is confused because of "smartphone" word in news.> I think, that PSRC just means every GSM/CDMA-connected PDA.> As long as Treo 600 can be called both Smartphone> (for a shape) or Communicator (for a functionality).

Yep, we consider the Treo to be a Smartphone. Basically 6.1 introduces a lot of features on top of 6.0 to support these kinds of devices: improved telephony stack and drivers, one-hand navigation, etc.

> Actually, i think, that Cobalt 6.0 simulator has NO> multithreading at all - as long as i found NO multithread> program-code at all (good, i could have looked bad, but:)

Cobalt from the very beginning has always supported multi-threading. Most of the APIs for this can be found in SysThread.h (for lower-level functionality) and Event.h (for new multi-threaded Event Manager APIs).

> The New Web Browser 3.0 works NOT in background mode on> Cobalt 6.0 Simulator!

It will take time for people to write applications that fully make use of many of the new features in Cobalt.

-- Dianne

--DiannePalmSource Application Frameworks Manager

RE: The son becomes the father?

Wait, is that means that those 11 smartphones, coming in 2005 are all a sort of this "Treo"-shape? Or you just don't use the word Communicator? I mean is there chance to have HiRes+ (or VGA) screen AND GSM-connectivity?And, by the way, is there any data about average number of PDAs (with Cobalt, actually) to be released in 2005? (no, please, don't say, "asc licensees" ;)

____________________Future Online!Sorry for my bad english :(

RE: The son becomes the father?

We can't say what devices might show up. All we can say is the set of features available in the platform (including VGA screens, landscape, 32bpp color, on-hand nav, telephony stack, bluetooth, 802.11, SD/IO, etc) that licensees can use to build their devices. There is nothing about the platform that restricts the form factor of the devices that might be built, except for things like the supported screen resolutions.

--DiannePalmSource Application Frameworks Manager

RE: The son becomes the father?

I can't tell you how much your presence is appreciated here, at least by me. Of course, we're largely enthusiasts and I would say people show a great deal of passion about your products, but so often it feels like both PalmSource and palmOne are unreachable. Thanks.

It was my "foolish" comment that was one of the ones you answered above. Note that I did not say you releasing an early version of Cobalt was foolish, only that you had pre-announced the date, which no doubt put artificial pressures on you as to what to include or exclude.

There is a lot of confusion now about Garnet and Cobalt, I would have to say. First we are told that the OS's are being renamed (from PalmOS 5 and 6) because they are both relevant to future devices: Garnet for SmartPhones and Cobalt for (presumably) other PDAs. Then you announce 6.1 which includes extra support for SmartPhones. However, no similar release of Garnet is made to add those very same features (none that I am aware, at least). Ya gotta expect that we would get confused by this. Why would SmartPhone manufacturers want to stick with Garnet if all the cool new development is happening only on Cobalt?

As for the "usability" of 6.0, I'm sure it was usable, to some degree. I also note that 9 months have passed since the release and there is no hint yet of a Cobalt device (and this community is not bad at ferreting out advance leaks, as you probably know). PDA's and their operating systems are pretty much your and palmOne's only products and it takes over 9 months (probably will end up being 15 months) to get a new OS into a working device?? Lucky for you that you and palmOne have become independent companies because now you can each point your finger at the other one as to why this is so.

My opinion is that this industry is moving faster than you are. Other companies like Microsoft and HP are, together, releasing a plethora of mobile devices each year, even though this is not either company's main market segment. One can argue whether this is a good thing or not, but I'd have to say the rate which the OS and devices are being advanced in the Palm world is much too slow.

Perhaps you are doing what you can within the budgets and schedules you're given and we are just a bunch of impatient early adopters! I don't know. I do know that it would go a LONG way to have the type of communication you're providing here on an on-going basis. We've gotten a rash of info from Ben Combee, from Michael Mace and from yourself over the last couple of days, coinciding with a big show. How about coming in to talk to us on a more regular basis? You don't have to give away secrets (well, one or two maybe :-). But talk to us about the things that bug us. Even little things. What about the fact you can't pull up the Command Bar when the DIA is collapsed? What about the fact you can't move to the end of a 32K memo except by a laborious scrolling process? What happened to delight the customer? What does your market research say? Are we delighted?

RE: The son becomes the father?

>>First we are told that the OS's are being renamed (from PalmOS 5 and 6) because they are both relevant to future devices: Garnet for SmartPhones and Cobalt for (presumably) other PDAs. Then you announce 6.1 which includes extra support for SmartPhones. However, no similar release of Garnet is made to add those very same features (none that I am aware, at least).

I'm sorry for the confusion. I don't know how you got the message that Palm OS Garnet was for smartphones and Palm OS Cobalt was for other types of devices, but it means we did something wrong in our communication.

We went from numbers to names because it was clear that both Palm OS Garnet and Palm OS Cobalt were going to coexist in the market for some time. That's still true. But neither version of the OS is targeted intentionally at just one type of device.

I personally think Palm OS Cobalt is better for developing more innovative, advanced devices of any type -- precisely the sorts of things that take longer to develop. Meanwhile, Palm OS Garnet is great for devices that are more similar to today's handhelds and smartphones, and I think it's very good for them (look at the Treo 600). That was the positioning we tried to use with the press when we announced Palm OS Cobalt.

In practice, we're finding that new licensees who haven't done a Palm OS product before are often looking at going straight to Palm OS Cobalt. Existing licensees are sticking with Garnet longer because:

1. They have already implemented some of the features that are in Palm OS Cobalt, so they have less of a need to go there urgently (for example, palmOne has already implemented some of the wireless features we just put into Palm OS Cobalt).

2. The more custom software a licensee has done, especially software that touches the PIM databases (address book, calendar, etc), the more work they'll need to do to port that to Palm OS Cobalt, because we changed the database formats. That slows them down.

Regarding what Palm OS Cobalt 6.1 (the new one) is for, you should think of it as wireless-focused, not just smartphone-focused. It includes a lot of work on WiFi and Bluetooth (plus a lot of other new features that have nothing to do with wireless).

RE: The son becomes the father?

And the facts don't lie. There are no Cobalt devices almost ONE YEAR after its introduction. Something is wrong here. Either this thing is not ready for prime time, or somebody at PalmSource is doing a really SHIITTY JOB at selling or working with licensees in getting Cobalt PDAs to market.

The excuses appear to be:1. Well, we just create the OS, we have no control over when licensees release the new-OS device.2. Well, we are better than MSFT because we allow licensees to customize the OS and this is why it's taking so long.

At the end of the day, results are what matter. Everything else is just conversation.

RE: The son becomes the father?

>>>2. The more custom software a licensee has done, especially software that touches the PIM databases (address book, calendar, etc), the more work they'll need to do to port that to Palm OS Cobalt, because we changed the database formats. That slows them down.

Can you elaborate on this? What exactly changed and why?

RE: The son becomes the father?

The Cobalt PIM apps all use the new schema databases that are available there, making it tremendously easier for third party developers to add new fields to database entries. (And the Cobalt Address Book includes quite a number of new fields already.)

Schema databases also support important new features like SQL queries on their contents. They are a good example of one of the many new features in Cobalt that are not immediately very visible to end-users, but are a very significant improvement to the platform's capabilities, for both developers and users, over the long term.

The Grassy Knoll of Milpitas

Yes, here's hoping we see a Cobalt device soon since it's almost one year since its release. Of course, hope is not a strategy.

Excuses are like a**holes, everyone's got one.

And the facts don't lie. There are no Cobalt devices almost ONE YEAR after its introduction. Something is wrong here. Either this thing is not ready for prime time, or somebody at PalmSource is doing a really SHIITTY JOB at selling or working with licensees in getting Cobalt PDAs to market.

The excuses appear to be:1. Well, we just create the OS, we have no control over when licensees release the new-OS device.2. Well, we are better than MSFT because we allow licensees to customize the OS and this is why it's taking so long.

At the end of the day, results are what matter. Everything else is just conversation.

Ouch!

Gekko, you potty-mouth! Your Mommy needs to teach you some manners, young lady!

Some would say you have TWO a-holes. That would explain all the verbal diarrhea constantly spewing from your lips. You're not going to embarass Mike Mace and company into making the Palms of your dreams. They just don't have the funds to do überPalms - even if they wanted to - so don't bother asking. Sony is/was your only hope for cutting edge design. And guess where Sony is now?

Palm's circled the wagons and is pushing smartphones (where the money is) and (cheap) incremental upgrades of their current lineup. Prepare to be underwhelmed until the next Tapwave is released in July, 2005. Sorry, pal.

Rumor du jour: ENGLISH version of CLIE VZ90 was spotted in San Francisco last week. If some enterprising soul ;-) can obtain a ROM dump from Sony's white (pink?) elephant, Dynamism will be doing massive sales pretty soon. That's the beauty of Palm: it's so simple. (Kinda like some posters around here!)

RE: The son becomes the father?

Mike Mace wrote:>"1. They have already implemented some of the features that are in Palm OS Cobalt, so they have less of a need to go there urgently (for example, palmOne has already implemented some of the wireless features we just put into Palm OS Cobalt).2. The more custom software a licensee has done, especially software that touches the PIM databases (address book, calendar, etc), the more work they'll need to do to port that to Palm OS Cobalt, because we changed the database formats. That slows them down."

Hey Mike - "less need to go there urgently"? "custom work slows them down"? It's been almost ONE YEAR since OS6 was released.

Why don't you just admit that you rushed to "release" OS6 so you'd make the deadline for Wall Street but it wasn't ready for prime time and then had to release a 6.1 which *maybe* now ready a YEAR later?

Dianne Hackborn: Are you able to comment further on Cobalt?

The Cobalt PIM apps all use the new schema databases that are available there, making it tremendously easier for third party developers to add new fields to database entries. (And the Cobalt Address Book includes quite a number of new fields already.)

Schema databases also support important new features like SQL queries on their contents. They are a good example of one of the many new features in Cobalt that are not immediately very visible to end-users, but are a very significant improvement to the platform's capabilities, for both developers and users, over the long term.

--DiannePalmSource Application Frameworks Manager

Dianne, a few of questions:

1) When will Cobalt REALLY be finalized?2) When will we see Cobalt SHIPPING in a real PDA?3) Have you been seeing many legacy apps breaking under Cobalt?4) When will all of the bugs in PalmOS 5.4 finally be fixed?5) Do you ever get up to The City these days? ;-)

First Half of 2005???

"Mace added that if cellular carriers and manufacturers test the operating system and it proves to be compatible with their plans, phones using Cobalt will come out in the first half of next year. There are about 10 different phones in development using the new software."

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